Gulagchev's scientists

In the past, we have seen ex-scientists such as MIT's Henry Kendall opposing nuclear power while evading the crucial point that there is no other way of mass producing electric power with comparable safety or comparable benefits to public health and environment.

They were a small minority the scientific community, especially among physicists and engineers; yet their anti-scientific and anti-humanitarian stand prevailed for many years because this totally unrepresentative band of political radicals was selected by the media moguls to speak for "science."

Now the Union of "Concerned" "Scientists," the Nuclear Winterists and the other academics appointed by NBC and the Sunday supplements have raised the stakes. They are battling Star Shield (SDI), preferring either preemptive surrender or deterrence by the threat to slaughter 30 million Russians in revenge for 100 million dead Americans. And they are using the same double-barreled tactic as they did for nuclear power: scare the pants off the impressionable, and conceal the alternative.

When Star Shield took the wind out of the pacifist impostors' sails, they said it would have to be perfect. No, it wouldn't, answered the genuine scientists: even an 80% effective defense, with the Soviets not knowing which one of five missiles will get through (to where?) presents an impossible risk to the aggressor. Prospect of failure is the ultimate deterrent.

It would be too expensive, said the sages who had squandered billions on the warriors against poverty, if not on the poor. But their figures, doctored, Kendalled and twisted, did not stand up.

The software is impossible to write, says the obligatory monthly anti-defense article in the current Scientific American, dismissing Artificial Intelligence (software to make decisions, write, optimize, and debug computer programs) in one lame paragraph that a high school computer buff could refute.

It would destabilize the world, says a mailing by the Mobilization for Survival with stationery adorned by 40 stars of the totalitarian left, alphabetically from Bella Abzug to Andrew Young, the latter an old hand in matters of stability: "Cuban troops in Angola," he said as Carter's ambassador to the UN, "have a stabilizing influence."

And here comes the latest fraud against Star Shield: If the US were protected against Soviet retaliation, it would launch a first strike. Imagine: the country that is close to apologetic for heeding the call for help by Grenada's neighbors, and the politicians whose supreme goal is reelection, will plunge the world into unprovoked nuclear war. What this means is simple: the brainwashers' parrots do not know the difference between the Soviet Union and the US.

It is necessary to explain to the scholars of higher education that the US does not install a puppet government in Mexico, subdue its people by poison gas, burn its peasants' crops, kill their cattle, and drive several million of its southern neighbor into exile. One must point out to the lumina of political science that US borders are not manned by guards who shoot any American trying to leave the country.

Half of America's scientists, the American Baloney Company (ABC) would have you believe, opposes Star Shield. Prof. F.W. Decker of Oregon S.U. points out that less than 4% of the American Physical Society have pledged not to participate in Star Shield research, and less than 100 out of the 2,000 campuses with physics faculties even have petitions to that effect.

Scientists who pass in silence over this affront to their profession are as guilty of inviting nuclear war as Gulagchev's brainless stooges.